In the places I’ve lived as an adult - Silicon Valley, New York - the striver set uses ambitious as an unqualified compliment. Self-evidently virtuous, always aspirational, rarely examined.
In David Bell’s biography Napoleon:
Napoleon would try to jump-start a literary career by entering a prize essay contest sponsored by a learned academy, in this case on the subject of happiness. Unlike Rousseau, he did not win, but his entry represented his best piece of written work, and contained lines that, coming from one of the most ambitious men in history, appear more than a little ironic:
“Ambition is, like all disordered passions, a violent and unthinking delirium. … Like a fire fed by a pitiless wind, it only burns out after having consumed everything in its path.”
Most meaning shifts aren’t stark Orwellian opposites - the Ministry of Truth running propaganda. Concepts creep along a spectrum, and the distance between what a word means and what a word does is where most of the interesting manipulation happens. Some words, like ambition, have had half their meaning stripped away.
Once there’s food on the table and a roof overhead, the naked pursuit of more starts to need rebranding. Those of us chasing it often run on an engine that’s hard to look at. Somewhere, unexamined, a part of us believes that when we achieve enough, we’ll finally be enough.
Some people never even see it - they only know ambitious as a compliment. I sometimes want to grab them by the shoulders and say: You don’t have to do this. I already like you.
The pitiless wind keeps blowing.